35-Point Practical Guide for Action

Insurgent American is primarily an intelligence asset, a strategic resource to organize information to support and guidepractical action ergo out self-identification as a practical strategic resource. In one analytical piece here, we explained that strategy, tactics, and intelligence are interfused. One cannot develop intelligence without some point of view about the kinds of action that are required to achieve strategic objectives.

Some readers have suggested we publish a of list of practical actions that people can take. While this is a slightly different take on our original conception of supporting practical activity with intelligence development, if we acknowledge the interfusion of action and intelligence, then it makes sense for us to state those kinds of actions that we see as practical insurgency.

Action requires more than doing what everyone can already do. It requires the development of particular practical skills. An organization may be able to organize a march of half a million people on the DC Mall and still not be able to grow a cabbage, fix a flat tire on a bicycle, or start a blog. Implicit in our core convictions is that the belief that practical independence from the dependence-creating structures of the current system is a precondition of revolution. That independence is predicated on the ever more widespread development of particular skills maybe even skills that we have to invent ourselves.

Other methods and theories of revolution have attached greater significance to having the correct ideas, the correct program, and the correct organization. These ideas and this practice have made inroads in places, but they inevitably run into the wall of their own dependence, in particular, their attachment to the industrial model of social organization, the orthodoxy of their ideas and the demand for ideological conformity as a membership gauntlet, and financial dependency on institutional structures like non-profits whose activities are circumscribed by government charters. We do not advocate wholesale abandonment efforts or even organizations that are already there and in motion. But we do believe that the voids, weaknesses, and blind spots of these models require remedies that reach people who cannot or will not operate within the constraints of these ideas, programs, or organizations.

New practices create new forms of consciousness; and here are a few ideas on some practices. Anyone can do one, two, or as many as are workable in present circumstances. The mental test we use in trying to determine the whats appropriate is woman-burb-hood. Is this something that can relate to the capacities of a woman who lives in either a suburb or an urban neighborhood?